There is no grit in games anymore, everything looks too clean
Also you need to take the CRT screen into account, that also made some stuff work in ways that modern displays can't replicate
IIRC the issue with raytracing right now is that hardware for raytracing is not ubiquitous enough so studios have to sink resources into fallback raster modes anyway. And having to do a weird mix of standard raster with raytracing fucks up the performance as well.
A bit of a PL but I've been involved in gamedev on the break between gen 6 and gen 7. It was always the same shtick "oh THIS magic technology will make game development cheaper!". Motherfucker this has NEVER been the case. In fact each generation surged the cost geometrically, EVERY FUCKING TIME. This is why most games are UE5 asset flips nowadays, because it takes a fucking army of people to make a dragon. PS1? One person in a day, sculpt a model, paint it, make a dozen bones, done.
PS2 - okay, more polys, maybe an environment map, more bones, but still fundamentally the same maybe 2-3 days.
PS3? Can't just paint it, now it's at least 3 separate textures, LODs, shitton of bones that requires a separate animator to work with the 3D artist just to make that not look like shit. This now takes a month
PS4? Baby, we're HDR land which means all those texture maps better be in linear space so that it doesn't look like utter shit, LODs are automated, meaning it looks like dogshit but it doesn't matter because the game barely runs at 30fps so nobody sees the animation anyway.
PS5? Fuck it, just buy the asset from the le ultrascan store. And throw in blur blur and more blur because every goddamn effect is now screenspace and aliases to fucking hell and back. Better not forget le raytracing so that the MCs ass (also bought from an asset store) reflects of a (blurred and aliased) puddle. The model doesn't have LODs because le nanite will fix it (no it won't). Still runs below 30FPS and in sub-native resolution but that's okay because you blurred your rendertarget 3 times already
Oh btw this is why your games now weight at a 100+GB. It's not the "le uncompressed audio". Hope you're enjoying the linear-space quixel scanned blades of grass (never mind the fucking blur on everything)
Fuck Tim Sweeney, fuck Unreal Engine, it's all fucking trash
So why does anyone want a Switch 2 exactly?
Because it's the last mobile platform to have physical releases